October282014

An Iranian-born mathematician has become the first woman to win a prestigious Fields Medal, widely viewed as the Nobel Prize of mathematics.

Maryam Mirzakhani, a Harvard-educated mathematician and professor at Stanford University in California, was one of four winners announced by the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) at its conference in Seoul on Wednesday.

“This is a great honour. I will be happy if it encourages young female scientists and mathematicians,” Mirzakhani said in a press release from Stanford University where she is a professor.

At the time of the award, Wisconsin professor Jordan Ellenberg explained her research to a popular audience:

… [Her] work expertly blends dynamics with geometry. Among other things, she studies billiards. But now, in a move very characteristic of modern mathematics, it gets kind of meta: She considers not just one billiard table, but the universe of all possible billiard tables. And the kind of dynamics she studies doesn’t directly concern the motion of the billiards on the table, but instead a transformation of the billiard table itself, which is changing its shape in a rule-governed way; if you like, the table itself moves like a strange planet around the universe of all possible tables … This isn’t the kind of thing you do to win at pool, but it’s the kind of thing you do to win a Fields Medal. And it’s what you need to do in order to expose the dynamics at the heart of geometry; for there’s no question that they’re there. (wikipedia)

August192014

farsizaban: Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani has become the first woman to ever win the Fields Medal — known as the "Nobel Prize of mathematics" — since the award was established in 1936. The Stanford mathematics professor was awarded the prestigious honor for her contributions to the fields of geometry and dynamical systems.

June072014

On May 30th, 2013, Edward Snowden left behind his family, his country, and his lucrative job as a contractor for the National Security Agency to blow the whistle on the most far-reaching and invasive spying programs in human history. A year ago today journalist Glenn Greenwald, documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras and NSA contractor-turned whistleblower Edward Snowden were combing through the millions of documents Snowden brought with him to Hong Kong to reveal for the first time the inner workings of the most secretive government agency of the most powerful and monolithic government in history. The year that followed shed an unprecedented amount of light on some of the most egregious abuses of power ever committed against the citizens of a supposed free country. Below you will find the list I have compiled of more than one hundred news articles detailing the extent the NSA has gone to effectively eliminate privacy in the 21st century.

In an excellent interview with VICE, Greenwald explains how metadata can tell government snoops more about a person than if they were just listening or reading the content of our communications. (The whole interview is worth your time but the section on metadata begins around 09:45).

Some takeaways: You can’t trust a single thing the government says. While it is spending tremendous amounts of resources attempting to eradicate privacy, it is working just as hard to shroud its own actions in secrecy. The surveillance state is not being erected around us for our own safety. It is a tool to crush dissent. The NSA’s mantra has been to “collect it all.” The programs are capable of seeing your very thought processes. Every keystroke you make, every link you click, every article you read, where you were and more. They have the capacity to know more about you than your therapist or your significant other. They know not only whom you associate with, but also who your associates associate with. It could be said they can know more about you than you know about you.

And the end result of this is that when people feel that they can be watched at any moment, they begin to police their own actions. It’s Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon transposed to the 21st century. When the government can know everything about a person, when privacy is effectively eliminated, it creates a subservient class. The telescreens of George Orwell’s “1984” exist today in the form of personal computers and smartphones. Big Brother is always present in our lives, capable of knowing the most intimate details of our lives. And the government treats the exposing of this fact to the general public as treason.

Such broad powers cannot be trusted with anyone. The NSA’s surveillance powers elevate the executive branch to a level unimaginable by the Founders. The president can and likely does track the communications of members of the legislature and judiciary. The checks and balances of the Constitution are rendered hollow and irrelevant by the size and scope of the NSA’s powers. It poses a threat to the liberties and freedoms of everyone in the world.

Since education is the whole point of Edward Snowden’s leaks I want you all to reblog this post and to tweet it on Twitter and share it on Facebook. Spread this list far and wide. The more people know the more likely they are to engage on the issues and actually bring about substantive reform.

January282014

February252013

"History and Identity in the Late Antique Near East", edited by Philip Wood

Egypte actus's curator insight, Today, 8:23 AM

History and Identity in the Late Antique Near East gathers together the work of distinguished historians and early career scholars with a broad range of expertise to investigate the significance of newly emerged, or recently resurrected, ethnic identities on the borders of the eastern Mediterranean world. It focuses on the "long late antiquity" from the eve of the Arab conquest of the Roman East to the formation of the Abbasid caliphate. The first half of the book offers papers on the Christian Orient on the cusp of the Islamic invasions. These papers discuss how Christians negotiated the end of Roman power, whether in the selective use of the patristic past to create confessional divisions or the emphasis of the shared philosophical legacy of the Greco-Roman world. The second half of the book considers Muslim attempts to negotiate the pasts of the conquered lands of the Near East, where the Christian histories of Hira or Egypt were used to create distinctive regional identities for Arab settlers. Like the first half, this section investigates the redeployment of a shared history, this time the historical imagination of the Qu'ran and the era of the first caliphs. All the papers in the volume bring together studies of the invention of the past across traditional divides between disciplines, placing the re-assessment of the past as a central feature of the long late antiquity. As a whole, History and Identity in the Late Antique Near East represents a distinctive contribution to recent writing on late antiquity, due to its cultural breadth, its interdisciplinary focus, and its novel definition of late antiquity itself.

Sophronius of Jerusalem and the end of roman history / Phil Booth -- Identity, philosophy, and the problem of Armenian history in the sixth century / Tara Andrews -- The chronicle of Seert and Roman ecclesiastical history in the Sasanian world / Philip Wood -- Why were the Syrians interested in Greek philosophy? / Dan King -- You are what you read: Qenneshre and the Miaphysite church in the seventh century / Jack Tannous -- The prophet's city before the prophet: Ibn Zabala (d. after 199/814) on pre-Islamic Medina / Harry Munt -- Topoi and topography in the histories of al-?ira / Adam Talib -- "The crinkly haired people of the black earth"; examining Egyptian identities in Ibn 'abd al-?akam's futu? / Hussein Omar -- Forgetting Ctesiphon: Iran's pre-Islamic past, ca. 800-1100 / Sarah Savant -- Legal knowledge and local practices under the early Abbasids / Mathiew Tillier.

February202013

Egypt’s former President, Hosni Mubarak, feared the spread of Shiite influence in his country and the region even though he did want strong ties with Iran, according to the former Egyptian foreign minister Ahmed Aboul-Gheit.

Aboul-Gheit told Al Arabiya that Egypt was watching Iran’s influence in the country closely along with Shiite Islamic institutions being founded in African countries bordering Egypt such as Chad and Sudan.

“We are watching, through our embassies in African countries, how Iran keeps expanding and branching out through their Shiite institutions as well as supporting them with a lot of money,” the former foreign minister said. In his interview, Aboul-Gheit says that such institutions and financial support is dangerous to the security of the region due to possible demonstrations and protests that Iran could instigate.

During the Islamic summit in Jeddah in 2005, "Mubarak didn't like confrontations, when I told him that Ahmadinejad wanted to meet him, he didn't welcome the idea," the former minister said.

"Mubarak came in the middle of the summit session and left immediately just to avoid any meeting with the Iranian president," he added.